1-Year Plan 
 Post 28: 27 April 2006

Recovering "Forty Poems"
and "Object Status"

Farewell reading for Ted Pearson, with Barrett Watten and Dennis Teichman. Zeitgeist Theater, Detroit, 26 April 2006.

In putting together a short set of works to be read at Ted Pearson's farewell reading in Detroit, I was drawn to a pair of neglected works from my archive—texts that, though they were published in one form or another, are still only partly realized in final form. They are, in one way or another, still in process, still becoming the poems they will have been. This is of course in the nature of the works themselves; they were written to engage their process of becoming in ways, as André Breton would have it, we are only beginning to find out. They were intended to enact their own "horizon shift," it now seems. 

The first, "Forty Poems," was written for French poet and editor Emmanuel Hocquard, who asked me to contribute a one-line poem (or "monostiche") for a special section of his anthology Orange Export Ltd. (Paris: Flammarion, 1986). Orange Export Ltd., an online French literary review explains, was a project organized by Hocquard and the painter Raquel that represented, in part, a response to the American objectivists (particularly Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen) and their concern for the "poem as object" with a cultural style that tended to reject theoretical framing (as may have been too available in journals such as Tel Quel and Change in the 1960s and 1970s). The notion of an "obstacle" to be enacted and overcome in the writing, as formulated by Claude Royet-Journoud, was an important component of their aesthetic. My own contact with Hocquard began about 1981, when he had visited, through the recommendation of poets Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, a number of American writers on both coasts. Subsequently (c. 1982), Carla Harryman and I met Hocquard, Royet-Journoud, and other French poets and critics in Paris—Jacques Roubaud, Joseph Guglielmi, Françoise de Laroque, Edmond Jabès, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Mitsou Ronat—initiating friendships with Claude and Françoise that have lasted to this day (I saw both in Paris this March). Our literary interests were advanced also by the publication of a short selection of the Language poets in the journal Change, titled L'Espace amérique (no. 41, 1981), where a selection of works and author's notes was introduced by Greek/American poet Nanos Valaoritis (by Ron Silliman, Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, Kathy Acker, Carla, and myself) in an issue that included writings on performance (Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Joseph Chaikin, John Cage, Merce Cunningham) and work from the New York school and African-American poets Ntozake Shange and Michael Harper. This was the Language school's first international notice, and though the issue itself was inadequately framed (leading to some controversy when one of our group wrote an angry letter to editor Jean-Pierre Faye shortly after our visit, resulting in no further contact with Faye), it also led to an opening with Hocquard and his crowd, as well as subsequent anthologies such as  21 + 1 Poètes américains d'aujourd'hui and 49 + 1 Nouveaux poètes américains, both edited by Hocquard and Royet-Journoud. American/French literary relations rapidly became a hot property, leading to the forum at Royaumont with Hocquard's Bureau sur l'atlantique series, many translations, and eventual notice by modernist critics of the international reception of the American avant-garde, from the objectivists to the Language school.

That story—the never-ending saga of literary value and history—is, however, not the immediate point of recovering "Forty Poems." Hocquard had asked for no more than one monostiche, but I decided to send him the following set of forty one-line poems from which he could choose, which I now want to re-present (or remediate) in digital form. The original was a typewritten, linear series, but the poem can be read here in the form of a digital matrix or, or by clicking on the title, viewed as one poem per page:

FORTY POEMS

                                                                                                    for Emmanuel Hocquard

I sent the poems to Hocquard, but in the European manner heard nothing for some time—about which one must, of course, assume nothing. Finally, Orange Export Ltd. appeared with one poem (WITH / Walls.) published on page 326, along with the somewhat obtrusive dedication line. At first glance, I actually failed to register that this was my poem; it did not seem all that representative of "Forty Poems" as I remembered it. The selection was in fact a precise act of co-authorship, the selection of the particular one-liner making a more radically minimalist statement than my series of poems allowed. In other words, I may have been hedging in providing forty poems and leaving the selection to Hocquard, but this hedge turned out to be the condition of freedom of the editor's choice, if also the site for hermeneutic anxiety on my part. I may also have been trying to avoid fetishizing the one-line poem, as in the issue of the journal Roy Rogers that inspired Hocquard, as well as the work of Robert Grenier. Later I was in Paris, where I ran into Claude. "Barrett, that was a terrific poem—"WITH / Walls." I liked that one." I had no idea what he was talking about, but he kept on repeating "WITH / Walls." until I realized he was referring to the poem, which I had not seen in print. Suddenly the genius of the work came through, via the theorist of the "notion of obstacle." Of course, I am and always will be writing "WITH / Walls."—with and through all manner of obstruction and resistance. What the multi-authored process enabled between Hocquard the editor, Royet-Journoud the theorist, and myself the producer was a theory of the text in and as mediation through processes of re-presentation that could never fully comprehend it. Not quite Mandelshtam's "Ode to Stalin," but deep.

The second recovered work coincides with some of the concerns of my "Rethinking the Avant-Garde" seminar at Wayne State, particularly the nature of the object in and as the avant-garde work. I had been citing a dictum that I thought might have come from Marx, in the Grundrisse perhaps, that "the worker builds the object in his head, then starts to construct." Or perhaps this had come from Zukofsky, somewhere in the middle of "A"–8. I could not recover the source of the original. What I did find, however, was the original text and artwork for "Object Status," which had appeared in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (no. 12, 1980) and subsequent anthology. I had never been entirely satisfied with the production of the text in printed form, in that it originated with a postcard from poet Tom Raworth and included a drawing and four photographs to be printed along with the written text. I thought it would be interesting to remediate the poem and make it available to members of my seminar in light of our current discussion. Along the way, I discovered that "the worker builds the object in his head"—possibly a paraphrase of Marx or Zukofsky—appears at the end of the penultimate paragraph. The poem as object thus becomes a mnemonic device of its own making.

OBJECT STATUS

What interests me about this poem is its status as an exploded "object." In other words, the poem and the interpretive possibilities that might be brought to it just is the form of object I had imagined. This would imply that the poetry, after the twin influences of objectivism and conceptual art might conjoin in the form a work that would be both objective and never entirely confined to its "object status." As object, then, the poem is both the site of production and thus eminently social, as well as the site of reflection and therefore interpretively subjective. Producing the object through the "wicker haze" of the language, ideology, and materiality that inspires and obstructs it was the goal of my experiment. At the same time, I had always understood that the poem had left something out: precisely the object in the realist sense that been its occasion, even though it is not mentioned in the work itself. This is the "red rock" that led to the "blue rock" of imagined reconstruction, an objet trouvé that I found one day in the Sierra foothills on the way to nowhere in particular. That is, I was driving either to or from a definite destination but for some reason stopped to look at a barren field, likely used for grazing, that was covered with large chunks of red volcanic rock, thrown down in some recent eruption. Sensing I was being "hailed" in what I would later know to be Althusser's sense, I walked directly up to a moderately large red rock and picked it up. That was the rock I was intended to pick up; I knew it the moment I did so. It had the perfect weight, shape, irregularity, and smoothness; the ferrous red could not have been closer to the materialization of a passion that had become inert and eloquent. This was about 1976; I have kept the rock ever since. There could never be another rock that could represent, in material form, the exact balance of attributes that made this the ever-during rock for me. Hence, when asked about an "object" that would come into my head "now" by Tom Raworth, I assumed that rock but refused to call it up visually or to remember it explicitly. It was below the level of either voluntary or involuntary memory, in the Proustian sense.

Here, then, is my opportunity to conjoin the original rock with its involuntary displacement in an act of theoretical reflection. It will be added to the series of images in the series of meditations on the nature of "object status" in this and all subsequent versions of it. But there is another interesting conjunction with this rock on my way to "object status." At the farewell reading for Ted Pearson, I decided to begin with a section of The Grand Piano on the subject of "friendship." Nothing could be more painful in Detroit than the moment of loss of one of our very small community of writers and artists; however, I meant to celebrate the disconnection of friendship as precisely that which enables it to endure. In the passage from The Grand Piano, a project that has not yet been made public but that Ted has recently joined, occurs the following reference to the finding of the red rock in the Sierra foothills:

Once, walking in a field in the Sierra foothills, I picked up a rock. In a field of rocks, all of which were red, volcanic. The tufa that earth emits, mere matter, which we confront. That rock also survived, coming to rest on its shelf in a midwestern suburb. For an article in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, I wrote about a "blue rock." The me and the not-me, in a masked disavowal. If wishes were rocks, or other forms of concrete displacement, they would be this writing . . .

Friendship, then, is knowable at the moment of the not-me, figured in picking up the rock. Being hailed by it, in fact; keeping it on the shelf for no good reason. Our friends hail us; that must be the figure Althusser sought. If this is ideological, it is also the site of the recognizably human, the person I am seen in the person I am not who seems to have something to say to me, something, as Breton would say, that I am always listening to. Ted's departure, then, would seem to be a good occasion to note the difficult process of hailing, the impediments to recognition that attend it, and the necessary for acknowledging its consequences. That's what friends are for. I remember being hailed by Ted Pearson, it was at the Grand Piano, with his shaved head, difficult lyricism, and impeded form, he seemed entirely other, a compelling presence but resistant to assignation. But that's another story . . .

[Text and images copyright © Barrett Watten 2006. Not to be reprinted without permission.]

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